34 was smolang when he built the Ark." Well . . . Then, there is a population for whom illicitness gives smoking a still greater purpose. As of Aprù 10th, when New York City's Smoke-Free Air Act goes into effect and the mild thrill of linger- ing over legal after-dinner cigarettes in restaurants is extinguished, we will witness the jolt of the taboo. Accord- ing to Lloyd F eit, the chef-owner of the downtown bistro Café Loup, where most of the regulars smoke, when smok- ing is allowed only in the bar area or in a special lounge "it's going to be a different kind of cigarette. Like suckin' on it real hard." F eit was putting words to what an informal survey of smoking New Yorkers suggests will be a highly prevalent, if subversive, re- sponse to the Smoke-Free Air Act: "I think smoking in the bathroom is gonna be huge. We're all going to be back in school again, like little boys in thick L " smOK.e. A casual young woman wearIng dark-red lipstick and black patent- leather pumps said, "It's going to cut into infidelity. Definitely. People tell themselves they're just having a drink with a colleague, and they light up a cigarette-everybody knows that's just a metaphor for sex." She went on, "Given that I smoke infrequently, and largely to look cool, smoking in a restaurant makes me think 1'm chic and adult, and I have no interest in seeming that way in the privacy of my own home." She became a little emphatic: "It's social intercourse. If you were sitting in a restaurant and ......1/ -- T .... you really wanted a cigarette and didn't have any, you might turn to the guy at the table next to you and say, Can I bum a cigarette?' Now if you finish your meal you won't turn to the table next to you and say, 'Are you done with that sandwich? Can I finish your sand- wich?'" On being asked if she would sneak into a rest room to have a few stolen puffs, she replied, "No. Never. I see no point in smoking unless men are watching." Some smok- ers will doubt- less avoid New York City en- tirely, and move to Paris. Be- cause of the in- finite pleasure in the illicit, however, some will stay. At Leisure Time, another bowler with a cigarette put it like this: "I'll just go on smokin' anyway. They'll have to call the cops on me." KNIPL IN LIMBO S OME people feel that Ben Katchor, with his "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" strip, has over the past several years been doing for comics what Marcel Proust once did for the novel. Others feel that, to be more precise, he's been doing for New York what Proust once did for Paris. Clearly, the Village VOlce's new editor, Karen Durbin, be- longs to neither of these camps. In fact, hardly had she taken control of the Voice, last year, than she let it be known that she was going to jettison the strip- which follows the piddling, two-bit photographer Julius Knipl through his daùy wanderings around a kind of per- fectly grungy metropolis-as soon as contractually possible, which turned out to be last month. That sad state of affairs was mean- while giving David Isay, a producer affiliated with National Public Radio, conniptions. Last year, as part of an NPR piece about Katchor, Isay had pro- duced a sequence of two-minute aural renditions of Katchor's evocatively mel- ancholy strip. And he had so much fun doing so that he resolved to keep on do- ing it. Scott Simon's producers agreed to provide a weekly slot for future Knipl ra- dio strips on Simon's Saturday-morning broadcast, and the Corporation for Pub- lic Broadcasting (I say' s usual patron) sig- nalled its initial enthusiasm But now, suddenly, the entire venture seemed in jeopardy. For although the Knipl strip would still be appearing in marginal papers all around the country (even in Iowa!), the loss of its regular outlet in New York, the strip's palpable THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 17, 1995 home, was beginning to make an even more than usually dispirited Katchor consider shutting down the whole enter- prise. But then Isay and Katchor hit on an idea: why couldn't the strip continue to appear on a weekly basis, completely unmediated, in various sites around the city itself-say, in the windows of the Gray's Papaya drink stands at Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and up at Broad- way and Seventy-second? Those par- ticular venues appealed to the pair be- cause (a) they seemed entirely in keeping with the ethos of the strip-the sort of tenuous places that Knipl might easùy stumble into in the midst of his rounds- and (b) Isay happened to have gone to high school with Gray's daughter. Katchor set to work fashioning a nifty display box, complete with eight- watt illumination, and Isay got in touch with the Grays. Mr. Gray, his daughter's enthusiasm notwithstanding, didn't warm to the idea. Days passed-"Geez," Katchor comments. "It got to be like au- ditioning for Leo Castelli!"-and when Gray demurred, Katchor and Isay were thrust back out onto the streets, Knipl- like, with their little scheme. T HEN, one morning, trudging down Second Avenue just south of St. Mark's Place, near I say' s studio, they happened to gaze into the narrow store- front window of the B & H Dairy, the last, scraggly remnant of a once teem- ing avenueful of kosher eating establish- ments. The window was plastered with placards proclaiming the day's fare ("2 eggs any style on our own challah bread"). Isayand Katchor looked at each other and wordlessly concurred: Perfect. Inside, as they wedged themselves onto the stools along the dally's narrow counter, Katchor realized that it was even more perfect than that: this was the very place where, thirteen years earlier, he first met his wife. The dairy had changed hands in the meantime, but the new man- ager, Beatrice Poznanski, a fetchingly harried young Polish émigrée, took to the idea without a moment's hesitation. That was a few weeks ago, and Katchor has been keeping the vitrine well stocked ever since. "Before, the kind of people who inhabit the strip didn't necessarily ever encounter it," he says. 'Whereas now, people walking by, out of the corner of their eye they might no- tice this new thing. What is it? Espe-